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LHC fears: Valid or Silly?

Jim Steele

Jim Steele

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Firstly, apologies if this has been covered before. I did a quick search (inc tags) and couldn't find anything.

Onto business, my understanding of physics, the origins of the universe, and grand unifying theories is not that good. I do however have a keen interest, and try to grasp as much as I can.

I've done a bit of digging and the general scientific consensus seems to be that fears of black holes being generated etc are based on an irrational fear of the unknown, rather than evidence.

It seems that even the LHC isn't powerful enough to generate a black hole, and if it did, the resulting anomaly would be so small that it would instantly evaporate in a puff of Hawking radiation.

Really I just want your take on it. I think most people who hang around in Sci/Tech are a lot smarter than I am. So, good people of TBBS, should I be worried? :(
 
No, you should not be worried. You are correct in stating that, if a black hole were to be formed, it would evaporate before becoming an issue.

The LHC generates collisions at energies no higher than those of many cosmic rays that bombard the upper atmosphere. So if there WERE a threat to Earth due to such high-energy collisions, we'd have experienced long ago already.
 
I think the strangelet issue is more of a worry than the black hole issue. But still, most likely unfounded.
 
if we've learned anything from our years of watching science fiction shows it's that huge electromagnetic devices always create some sort of disastrous black hole, wormhole, vortex etc
:D

but we have nothing to worry about because we can count on a crack team of good looking time travelers from a parallel universe to show up and save the day at the last moment :D
 
Failing that, survivors from the future will use the LHC to travel back in time and stop it from being turned on.

Really, though, getting the truely dangerous experiments off of Earth is a great justification for a moonbase. Whether this is one of them I can't say.....
 
Lindley said:
I think the strangelet issue is more of a worry than the black hole issue. But still, most likely unfounded.
Click to expand...

They're both unfounded for the same reason... collisions of equal or higher energies constantly happen in both our upper atmosphere and all over the universe. If a strangelet could be created and act as a seed on normal matter, there would already be significant evidence of it.

On the other hand, I am a little worried about a resonance cascade...
 
People are too quick to believe that mankind can be a devastating force in the Universe.

Even our most powerful weapons of mass destruction pale in comparison to the might of a major hurricane or the smallest of solar eruptions.

We simply dont matter that much in the Universe, kiddies....
 
JustAFriend said:
We simply dont matter that much in the Universe, kiddies....
Click to expand...
I don't think the people worrying about these experiments are worried about the Universe, but about Earth, our teeny, tiny, little corner of the universe, which we obviously can affect.

Why do you think that non-scientists are foolish to question the wisdom of experiments that hypothetically may have serious negative consequences?

---------------
 
Silly of course because we all know class 13 civilizations will eventually blow themselves up by trying to determine the mass of the Higgs-Boson particle.

Not really blow up mind you but thurn their planets into a giant compressed particle the size of a pea.
 
I don't exactly think the initial concern was silly... but I think once LHC convened a safety commission to evaluate the possibilities and determined they were like... astronomically minimal-approaching-zero, that continuing to claim it's going to be disastrous is a little silly. I mean, I think the strangelet probability is like lower than the probability that all of the atoms in your body will simultaneously and spontaneously tunnel onto the moon and you'll die of suffocation.

I'm mixed on the semi-metaphysical question of whether anything we can do can actually damage anything significant. On one hand you can say no because of how meager our knowledge of the universe is. on the other hand you can say yes because of how meager our knowledge of the universe is. Given our lack of understanding of singularity physics it's entirely possible that our universe was created by some goofball scientists trying to figure out this very thing and producing these energy collissions. Or, maybe not these, but at higher energies we haven't, but eventually will, reach. Who knows. As a scientist I'm not willing to stop so, if it happens because our ignorance is just so great that we can't possible see it happening... it happens ;)
 
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